Saturday, May 30, 2015

Regular readers will know that we occasionally run a feature called "mysteries that have me mystified"—little featurettes about authors that remain stubbornly mysterious. We've managed to track down information on quite a few little known authors here at Bear Alley, but our subject today is one of the most popular authors in the world. Yet there's still a big mystery surrounding his writing career.

Leslie Charteris was the author of The Saint and one would expect that his CV was thoroughly researched and widely known. Not so. I was surprised to discover whilst reading The Saint and Leslie Charteris by W. O. G. Lofts & Derek Adley, that Charteris's earliest stories had yet to be discovered. The Lofts & Adley book I read many years ago, but it would seem that

Charteris was born May 12, 1907, at Straits Settlements, Singapore, the son of Dr Suat-Chuan Yin, a wealthy Chinese surgeon, businessman and civic leader who claimed he was a direct descendent of the emperors of China in the Shang dynasty, and an English mother, Lydia Florence Yin (née Bowyer). He was christened Leslie Charles Yin, but later changed this name legally by deed-poll to Leslie Charles Charteris in 1926; when he became a naturalised American citizen in 1946 he officially became Leslie Charteris. He chose Charteris after Colonel Francis Charteris, a founder-member of the Hellfire Club.

By the time he was twelve he had travelled around the world three times with his parents, and had learned Chinese and Malay from servants before he could speak English. The Yin family lived in England for some time where Leslie and his younger brother Roy were taught by a tutor, Emily Fleming who returned with them to Singapore in 1914.

Around that time, aged 7, he began writing and at 10 years old was given his first typewriter and was “writing and editing a one-man magazine to which my relatives had to subscribe under discrete blackmail.” He sold his first poem to The Straits Times, where it appeared when Yin was only nine years old. Another poem, "The Battle of the Figures", appeared in the February 1919 issue of Boy's Own Paper under the byline Leslie C. Bowyer-Yin when he was only 11.

Mrs. Yin split from her husband and came to England with her two sons in 1919 where Leslie attended Falconbury School near Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, and Rossall School in Fleetwood on the Lancashire coast.

As a child, Charteris's favourite reading was Chums. To quote Lofts & Adley:

His biggest treat at Christmas was the red-bound annual volume of Chums,
which contained the whole of the year's issue of the magazine. The
greatest joy was that he could read the serials stright through and did
not have to wait in suspense for next week's thrilling instalment.

Lofts & Adley also revealed:

His first successful magazine sale, at the age of sixteen, was a story set in the Pacific, concerning a pearl, which is now unfortunately not traceable. This was written while he was still at school and the resulting cheque from a publisher, for a few guineas, convinced him more than ever that writing was easy...
Another story, probably his second effort, was published in Hutchinson's Sovereign Magazine in January 1925 featuring a detective, and was entitled "One Crowded Hour". It was written under the nom de plume of 'Leslie C. Bowyer'—the latter being his mother's maiden name.

Bill Lofts & Derek Adley compiled an extensive bibliography of Charteris's work for their book, which they introduced by reiterating that:

Leslie Charteris wrote his first story in 1924 whilst still attending school at Rossall. This story, despite exhaustive research, has never been traced, but it probably appeared in one of the Hutchinson group of magazines, the majority of which are unfortunately missing from the files of the British Museum. This story concerned a pearl and was set in the Pacific.

Here Bill, Derek and I part company, because I think Charteris sold his first story to his favourite story paper, Chums. This is, of course, pure speculation, but my money is that Charteris's first sale appeared under the title "Pearls of Price" under the nom de plume Saville Hall in Chums 1720 (30 August 1925). There's no direct evidence, but I do have the following circumstantial evidence: it is from the right period and it concerns pearls and is set in the Pacific. Also, it is in the author's favourite boyhood paper. Although the evidence is slim, it is still a pretty good fit.

Friday, May 29, 2015

After the chaos of last week, we're in the calm of the post-storm clean-up. The magazine is at the printers and I've caught up on some sleep, some work and Mad Max: Fury Road, which I finally got to see on Wednesday evening.

What a fantastic film. It's a glorious, brain-fryingly trashy movie, loud and visually arresting. Well-worth immersing yourself in it for two hours for a full-on experience. I loved it.

For most of the rest of the week I've been trying to finish off the Harry Bensley story and tidy up. Bensley, some of you might recall, was the other man in the iron mask, a conman who walked around the South Coast claiming that he was undertaking a bet to walk around the world. Well, I've greatly expanded my original article, which I ran here some months ago, and I'm just waiting on one last bit of information before I put the whole thing together as a little booklet. I'm not expecting to sell many, but the text will also be available on Kindle for anyone interested.

The tidying up has taken a couple of interesting turns. My first thoughts were that I probably had half a dozen boxes which were full of old paperwork. So far I've found sixteen and the far end of the lounge looks like a bomb has hit it, reminiscent of when we moved in—as you'll see from the photo above. Worse than that, I had a visitor from the past today (Thursday) who brought around some old magazines, so overall I've gained more junk today than I've disposed of.

The visitor was Graham Baldock, who was the designer on Comic World. I haven't seen him for fifteen years since we worked together on another magazine called Science Fiction World in 2000. He's retired now, although he still does a few bits... now why doesn't that surprise me? He always was a workaholic. He's now living in glorious Shropshire, not far from where Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine novels were set.

Graham was only briefly visiting Colchester and it was great fun to catch up. I never got to ask him about an old board I found with an early design for Comic Collector magazine, but now I have his e-mail address, I'll try to get his comments.

I've stumbled across a pile of over fifty film promo posters from around 2001. We were going to the cinema quite a lot back them and these were giveaways. They seem to have disappeared in recent years, which is a shame because they were nice.

I'm finding some fascinating stuff while I'm turfing through these boxes so I'm confident that there will be some weird and delightful things turning up on Bear Alley over the next week, including what I think might be the first short story sold by Leslie (The Saint) Charteris, which I'll post tomorrow, and the solution to one of my long-standing "mysteries that have me mystified" as the author behind the pen-name Justin Atholl is finally revealed.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The December 1987 issue of Zzap! 64 carried a 16-page bound-in supplement featuring "Judge Death vs. Judge Anderson", a colour reprint of the opening episode of Anderson PSI Division's solo debut from two years earlier. The popular Anderson had first appeared in 2000AD in 1980 but was, by 1987, a regular in her own strip.

The supplement featured 10 pages of "Revenge" drawn by Brett Ewins and coloured by John Burns. The cover and centre-spread pin-up were by Brian Bolland, whilst Ewins provided the back-cover pin-up. The remaining two pages were taken up with an advert for Titan Books, who co-sponsored the supplement along with Fleetway Publications and Piranha, and an advert for the game itself, which revealed it would be available on the Spectrum, Commodore and Amstrad cassette for £9.95 and on Commodore and Amstrad disc for £14.95.

But it was not to be. It was announced in early 1986 that Hobbyte, a Hungarian programming team based in Budapest, was coding Judge Death for Piranha. Judge Death was first previewed in Crash and Sinclair User in November 1987, where it was given a mid-November release date. According to Tamas Revbiro, quoted in a Crash news item:

It's very near to the kind of science fiction very popular in Hungary. It's a crooked kind of science fiction with lots of violence and bloodshed. And the technological gadgets are already well-known through other authors so it's not totally new.

Crash announced that it would be carrying a 16-page supplement with their Christmas 1986 number (issue 48) as well as a full review of the game.

The supplement was also published in Zzap!, the companion paper to Crash, which also carried a brief preview in which it was mentioned that Piranha were in the final stages of completing Judge Death. "The game is currently at an early stage of development, with rather rough gameplay and crude graphics. Underneath, however, the action feels quite playable. We can but hope that Piranha manages to fulfill the game's potential."

The main problem with the game was that they apparently used Koala Pad
to design all the backgrounds, and unfortunately the C64 did not have
the power to shift them around effectively. Pirahna were actually quite
miffed with the conversion.

A new programmer, SIR, was drafted in and has subsequently said:

As for Judge Death, well the game was developed in Hungary, but I
remember the producers in London weren’t very pleased with the game. The
original design for the game – done by a guy called Kevin Williams –
was pretty good, but they hadn’t done a good job in coding it.
The publisher wasn’t very happy with the game or the graphics, and I was
drafted in to help to try to get the game up to an acceptable standard.
I remember visiting the publisher to discuss with them what we could do.
To start with the graphics weren’t very good, and too clean – there was
no detail. So I added all the graffiti and background objects you see in
the game. I didn’t have much time so i couldn’t do a lot. I did do some
very nice C64 Dark Judges sprites, but unfortunately they didn’t end up
in the game.

Piranha had already announced that they were working on another 2000AD-related game featuring Halo Jones and were considering an Ace Trucking Co. game, too. It was not to be: Piranha went out of business before the Judge Death game could be released; Halo Jones never saw the light of day.

Judge Death did, in a way, appear. Piranha may have gone but the game elements were taken over by Novatrade, who removed any mention of Judge Death, Judge Anderson and Mega-City and released the game as Horror City in 1989. There's a review of Horror City here with screen grabs, and it is unmistakably the same game. The character Sinclair is clearly Judge Anderson. Graffiti scrawled on the walls of Horror City that reads "Sump Stinks!". "Get Ugly", "Chopp" will only mean anything if you remember Otto Sump or Chopper from Mega-City.

According to the reviewer:

At some point Novotrade took the work that had been done on Judge Death, scraped away the top layer of 2000AD
while still leaving the background details that clearly mark Horror
City out as Mega-City One and released it under a new name. They
probably shouldn't have bothered.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Almost exactly 21 years ago, Prog 889 headed into newsagents on the 19th of May, 1994. The cover date was 27 May.

About a month before, as I was editor of Comic World I received a packet of promo material from Fleetway Editions, probably put together by editor Steve McManus or John Tomlinson, who was working at Fleetway as an editorial assistant around that time. Whoever it was, the photocopies were all a bit wonky, guys.

Editors did not receive a huge amount of press material; I used to do a monthly summary of Judge Dredd Megazine based on a phone call to David Bishop, for instance, or if there was to be a relaunch or promoted issue, I'd head up to Fleetway with my trusty dictaphone.

But for some reason, I have a set of press releases from Prog 889 which I thought I'd share with you. Starting with the cover, which is an interesting study. The photocopy reveals a number of differences between the promo version and the final artwork that graced the cover. The printed image appeared squashed to make room for the lettering, but there are other, subtler differences. Dredd is holding his Lawgiver at a different angle, for instance, and the Eagle's "wing" on Dredd's shoulder has only five feathers rather than the published six (thanks to Chris Mitchell, who pointed this out when I posted the image of Facebook a few days ago).

Because this was a relaunch issue, the number of pages was increased to 44 rather than the usual 36 and there was a cover-mounted free gift of £17 worth of discount coupons for videos and games at HMV, although this had to be weighed against a 5p price increase to 75p.

Some of these details escaped the information sheet that was sent out (above), which concentrated on the stories that were being launched that issue. Here are the promo sheets for each character and scans of artwork that accompanied them... nothing for Dredd, unfortunately, although I may stumble upon it at a later date.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

In the June 1996, Wired carried an interview with Iain M. Banks along with an extract from his new novel, Excession. Fiction by Banks rarely appeared in magazines. I believe it only happened twice. [[Update: Not often but not quite as few as twice. Phil Stephensen-Payne sent over the brief list of Banks' magazine appearances, which also include stories for Interzone, The Observer Magazine and The Fiction Magazine, plus another extract, "The Business", in Computing.]]

Here's Wired's coverage along with a couple of examples of Daniel Mackie's illustrations.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

When Hornby celebrated their 25th annual Scalextric catalogue in 1983, they celebrated in style with a series of stunning illustrations by none other than Ian Kennedy. The front cover is quite a well-known image as it has been posted around the web on a number of occasions. However, Kennedy also supplied a number of illustrations inside the catalogue, which made innovative use of mixing art and photography.

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS

AVAILABLE NOW!Forgotten Authors Vol.1Click here for details and payment options"This is utterly fascinating: what a terrific accomplishment! It has held and engaged me. Authors who are only names have been documented and recorded, from the pathetic to the successful, and everywhere in between. This is incredible research, and I cannot begin to thank you enough for sharing it. I’m dipping into it with absolutely enormous pleasure."—Richard Bleiler"Recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of books, book publishing, obscure authors or even researching family history. Looking forward to Volume 2"—Amazon review.

AVAILABLE NOW!The Men Behind Flying Saucer ReviewClick here for details and payment options"Beginning in 1955, the Flying Saucer Review has been key to chronicling the appearance of Unidentified Flying Objects and the latest theories of why they have been appearing in our skies. A dedicated group of enthusiasts - amongst them an accountant, a publisher's editor, a test pilot, a novelist and a member of the House of Lords - were amongst those who helped put together this remarkable magazine. Who they were and how they came to work together makes for a fascinating tale, some of it as curious as the phenomena the magazine studied."

AVAILABLE NOW!Countdown to TV ActionClick here for details and payment options."The perfect compliment to my set of Countdown/TV Action" - Graham Bleathman."A wonderful trip down memory lane. Recommended" - Paul Simpson, Sci-Fi Bulletin"If you read Countdown as a child, you'll be fascinated by this account of its making ... indispensable." - John Freeman, Down the Tubes"The definitive history of the title" - Lew Stringer, Blimey!"I urge you to grab a copy and give Steve Holland a tip of the hat for the amount of hard work, research and love he's poured into making a book of information become an interesting story" - Barnaby Eaton-Jones, The Cult Den

Lion King of Picture Story PapersClick here to order"It's a great read in itself and has sent me back to the Lion comic to re-read some of my childhood favourites. The pictures are reproduced crystal clearly and even this old man can read the original art ... It's a gorgeous book and if we are snow-bound as the media has been saying for weeks, I have plenty to keep me amused this chilly January weekend!" - Norman Boyd.

Sexton Blake Annual 1941Click here to order"If you've been meaning to give Sexton Blake's adventures a try, this would be a great place to start. I've seen the actual annuals go on Ebay for three or four hundred bucks, so this is definitely a bargain too." - Singular Points.

Peter Jackson's London Is Stranger Than FictionClick here to order"The original books have been highly collectable for many years now, but finally they’ve been republished in a single volume from Bear Alley Books ... for the ridiculously reasonable price of £14.99. Do yourself a favour. " Christopher Fowler.

OUT OF PRINT!ArenaClick here for details and payment options"This book goes straight to the top of my large reading pile" - Graeme Neil Reid"With reality TV overload and the rise of the risque and the brutality of today’s society, this story still has a pertinent message for those of us who are willing to listen to it. In fact, I think the story is more relevant today than it was in 1979." - Colin Noble, Down the Tubes"The story is a fun read, but the star of the show is the art. Alcatena is a class act." - Hibernia Comics